I focus almost exclusively on PvP, whether solo, small gang, or large bloc warfare. In the past, I've been a miner, mission runner, and faction warfare jockey. I'm particularly interested in helping high-sec players get into 0.0 combat.

Monday, August 3, 2015

Active Armor Tanking for the Shield Booster

I am a shield-tanker. I admit
this quite freely. I love the Ancillary
Shield Booster (or ASB, for the hip kids), particularly for solo roaming, and
have had a lot of success with ASB Merlins, Harpies, Svipuls, Vagabonds,
Stabber Fleet Issues… you name it.

Shield tanking, in general, benefits from three distinct
advantages. The first is, of course, the
immediate application of shield reps.
The moment you activate the module (or more precisely, the moment the
server receives and processes the command to hit the module), your shield
realizes the benefit. It’s a very easy
decision process… need shield, receive shield, wait.

Shield tanking also produces a very satisfying psychological effect on
your opponents. There’s nothing more
disheartening than to hope, for a moment, that you really ARE doing as much
damage as it appears and you’re simply shredding your opponent, only to have
your dreams and spirits crushed the ASB restores a significant percentage of
shield in one burst. I’ve had pilots
primaries off of me once they saw that.

But the last key benefit of shield boosting over armor tanking is the
ability to fit oversized boosters. When
we talk about ASB fits, we’re talking about oversized ones: frigates fitted
with mediums, cruisers and above with XL.
Lost in the mix are small and large ASBs, which are utterly worthless in
every application (bold statement, I know, but there it is).

And it’s that reason that I love shield boosting over armor
boosting. Armor repairers can’t be
oversized.

That said, despite my preference for shield boosting, I recognize that
one generally doesn’t have an option to armor vs. shield tank specific
ships. Allow me to share some of the
mistakes I’ve made, in the hopes that you don’t do the same.

With a shield booster, it’s not possible to be cap stable without
making serious sacrifices in another area.
Shield boosting fits into the general approach of shield ships – strike
fast, maintain mobility, and dictate the terms of the engagement. Active shield boosting helps you avoid the
signature radius blooms associated with shield extenders, yet still maintain
your mobility and allow you to endure some punishment. When active shield boosting, your shield
repper will fully drain in about 30 seconds and take a full minute to reload,
so it benefits from combat approaches favoring quick strikes followed by
repositioning or maneuvering.

The name of the active armor repping game is cap efficiency over the
long haul, though. Shield boosters
provide more repping power in a short period of time, but armor repping allows
you to endure longer without being capped out.
But this isn’t possible without some help, and not without trade-offs.

The “help” comes in the form of a cap booster – the largest you can
fit. This component is so critical to
any active armor tank that I chuckle when people say, “armor repping resides in
the low slots”. Unlike ancillary shield
boosters, ancillary armor repairers still use capacitor when cycling. If you think this doesn’t make a big deal, I
refer you to this Daredevil loss. On paper, I had enough of an active tank to
survive. In reality, I capped out after
only two or three cycles of my reppers (and yes, that loss did prompt me to
start this article).

A cap booster would have kept me in the game far longer, and I may have
came out on top. And unlike ASBs, it’s
possible for an enemy to shut down your active tank with a neut. You must maintain the ability to boost your
capacitor between your enemy’s neut cycle and your armor rep cycle. Failing to do so can result in a significant
delay on your reps.

Now, some of you will note that I flew with a dual-rep fit, and may ask
whether the cap hunger of that setup is responsible for me capping out so
quickly. To you, I say, “Scoff!” Dual reps are an absolute requirement if you
intend on fighting anything your size or larger. Because you can’t oversize your repper, you
need more of them.

A frigate is capable of fitting a medium shield booster, whereas it
cannot fit medium armor reppers. Shield
boosting can also fit multiple ASBs, whereas only one AAR can bit fit per
ship. Add in the fact that shield boost
amplifiers (medium slow) increase boosting by 36%, whereas the armor “nano”
rigs increase armor repping by only 15%.
The effect of these differences is so significant that a viable armor
setup requires two armor repairers.

But these individual objections can be overcome with a best-practice setup…
an AAR plus a class-appropriate repairer and a cap booster to keep feeding the
setup power. In this way, ships –
particularly those with a bonus to repair amount per cycle – can field a very
nasty tank indeed. You can even augment
your fit with one of the two “Nano” rigs to either reduce the cycle time or
increase the repair amount (I’d go with the Auxiliary Nano Pump rig first, and
add a Nanobot Accelerator rig if your cap setup can endure it).

Deviate from this setup at your own risk. Removing one of the repairers dramatically
limits your maximum repair, while skimping on the cap booster fatally cripples
it, resulting in losses like the Daredevil above.

And that’s the problem with armor repping. When you use an active rep fit, your enemies
can make some obvious assumptions about your fit… assumptions they wouldn’t
necessarily need to make if they were facing a shield boosting ship. The “surprise” factor will have to rest in
the utility mid-slots, a particular strength of armor ships.

But, when done well, a dual-armor fit can outlast your opponents as the
mid ewar throws them for a loop. And
that’s quite a bit of fun!

3 comments:

I am a shield man myself when it comes to flying solo or micro gang. You already stated many of the advantages in shield active tank vs armor active tank but you missed a critical one commonly used in low sec. Active shield booster fit ships benefit greatly from the crystal set implant! There is no equivalent for armor ships as the slave set is for buffer fits (which works well in mid sized fleets with logi ships).

A good point. While using Crystal implants in null-sec is a dodgy prospect given the prominence of bubblers in gate camps (or would be, if anyone roamed/lived in null anymore...), it's much more viable in low-sec.

Just be sure to warp to perches instead of directly to gates. Smartbombs hurt.

A good point. While using Crystal implants in null-sec is a dodgy prospect given the prominence of bubblers in gate camps (or would be, if anyone roamed/lived in null anymore...), it's much more viable in low-sec.

Just be sure to warp to perches instead of directly to gates. Smartbombs hurt.

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